The food of a younger land [book club kit] : a portrait of American food : before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional : from the lost WPA files

Recommended by Chef José Andrés on The Drew Barrymore Show!A remarkable portrait of American food before World War II, presented by the New York Times-bestselling author of Cod and Salt. Award-winning New York Times-bestselling author Mark Kurlansky takes us back to the food and eating habits of a younger America: Before the national highway system brought the country closer together; before chain restaurants imposed uniformity and low quality; and before the Frigidaire meant frozen food in mass quantities, the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it. In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, FDR created the Federal Writers' Project under the New Deal as a make-work program for artists and authors. A number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called "America Eats," was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed. The Food of a Younger Land unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life. Mark Kurlansky's brilliant book captures these remarkable stories, and combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future. Kurlansky serves as a guide to this hearty and poignant look at the country's roots. From New York automats to Georgia Coca-Cola parties, from Arkansas possum-eating clubs to Puget Sound salmon feasts, from Choctaw funerals to South Carolina barbecues, the WPA writers found Americans in their regional niches and eating an enormous diversity of meals. From Mississippi chittlins to Indiana persimmon puddings, Maine lobsters, and Montana beavertails, they recorded the curiosities, commonalities, and communities of American food. Introduction The Northeast eats. Eating in Vermont / Roaldus Richmond Vermont foods / Cora A. Moore Rhode Island May breakfasts / Walter Hackett Dishes New York City's hotels gave America / Allan Ross MacDougall New York literary tea / Jerry Felsheim The automat / Edward O'Brien New York soda-luncheonette slang and jargon Drugstore lunch / Edward O'Brien Italian feed in Vermont / Mari Tomasi Long Island rabbit stew : Hasenpfeffer North Whitefield, Maine, game supper / Donald McCormick Raising mushrooms in Pennsylvania Vermont sugaring-off / Roaldus Richmond An editorial memorandum on clams / James Francis Davis Maine clambake / Harry M. Freeman New York indoor clam-bake / M. Metevier Rhode Island clam chowder / Walter Hackett, Henry Manchester Long Island clam chowder Maine chowders / Mabel G. Hall Oyster stew supreme at Grand Central, New York / Allan Ross MacDougall Rhode Island Johnny cakes / Henry Manchester, William Baker Beans / James Francis Davis Maine baked beans / Mabel G. Hall Kenneth Roberts' Maine-style hot buttered rum / Donald McCormick The South eats. Mississippi food / Eudora Welty Recipes from prominent North Carolinians / Katherine Palmer Recipes from Arkansas Foods along U.S. 1 in Virginia / Eudora Ramsay Richardson Mississippi African-American recipes Diddy-wah-diddy / Zora Neale Hurston Brown Hotel's Christmas dinner, Louisville, Kentucky, 1940 Alabama footwashing at Lonely Dale / Jack Kytle Coca-cola parties in Georgia Delaware's big quarterly South Carolina backwoods barbecue / Genevieve Wilcox Chandler Mississippi barbecue sauce The Possum Club of Polk County, Arkansas Georgia possum and taters Exotic Florida Kentucky ham bone soup Kentucky burgoo Sergeant Saunders' Virginia Brunswick stew / J.B. Cook North Carolina chitterling strut / Katherine Palmer Menu for chitterling strut Mississippi chitlins Kentucky oysters Louisiana "tete de veau" / H. Michinard Kentucky wilted lettuce North Carolina oyster roasts Eufaula, Alabama, oyster roast / Gertha Couric Georgia oyster roast / Louise Jones Dubose South Carolina Pee Dee fish stew / Louise Jones Dubose Fish fry on Levee, Mississippi Mississippi mullet salad The baked fish of Alabama's coast / Francois Ledgere Diard Conch eats conch and grunts, Florida / Stetson Kennedy Josephine's Mississippi crabs Maryland crabs Florida shrimp pilau supper (St. Augustine) / Rose Shepherd South Carolina chicken bog / Louise Jones Dubose Virginia chicken / John W. Thomas The use and manufacture of filé in Mississippi / Jack Bathia Grandma Smith's Mississippi hoecake Florida hush puppies Kentucky spoon bread Mississippi molasses pie Divinity chocolates of Kentucky Alabama cane grindings and candy pullings / Gertha Couric Alabama eggnog / Jack Kytle Kentucky eggnog Old fashioned cocktail Mississippi pear wine / Clarence Kerns The mint julep controversy "Original Kentucky" mint julep (Frankfort Distilleries) "Original Kentucky" mint julep (Drake Hotel) Mississippi mint juleps The Middle West eats. Nebraskans eat the wieners / Hans Christensen Urban Kansas eats and drinks Sioux and Chippewa food / Frances Densmore Nebraska buffalo barbecue Nebraska Pop Corn Days / M.C. Nelson Wisconsin sour-dough pancakes Nebraska baked beans / J. Willis Kratzer Cooking for threshers in Nebraska / Estella Tenbrink Wisconsin and Minnesota lutefisk Indiana pork cake / Hazel M. Nixon Nebraska lamb and pig fries / H.J. Moss Kansas beef tour / William Lindsay White Comments to Parker T. Van de Mark, November 4, 1941 Nebraska eats pheasants Nebraska cooks its rabbits / H.J. Moss Minnesota Booya picnic Indiana persimmon pudding A short history of the American diet / Nelson Algren The Far West eats. Oregon salmon barbecue / Joseph McLaughlin Puget Sound Indian salmon feasts Washington's Geoduck clams A Washington community smelt fry / Carroll Kennedy Montana fried beaver tail / Edward B. Reynolds Oregon wild duck / Joseph McLaughlin Utah salmi of wild duck / William H. Meal Washington wildcat parties / Carroll Kennedy Foraging in Montana / Edward B. Reynolds Montana dulce / Edward B. Reynolds Washington aplets and cotlets Colorado superstitions Washington state hot school lunches The Basques of the Boise Valley / Raymond Thompson Western revolving tables / Edward B. Reynolds Oregon pioneer memories / Sara Wrenn Two recipes from the Bohemia district of Oregon / Joseph McLaughlin An Oregon protest against mashed potatoes / Claire Warner Churchill The potatoes of Kow Kanyon, Oregon / Joseph McLaughlin Depression cake / Michael Kennedy & Edward B. Reynolds Oregon blue ruin / Andrew Sherbert The Southwest eats. Iowa picnic in Los Angeles / John Moste Food a la concentrate in Los Angeles / Don Dolan A Los Angeles sandwich called a taco / Dolan A California grunion fry / Charles J. Sullivan La Merienda in New Mexico Choctaw Indian dishes / Peter J. Hudson Funeral cry feast of the Choctaws Arizona out-of-doors cookery / Edward Parrish Ware Notes on Oklahoma pioneer eating An Arizona menudo party / J. Del Castillo Tucson's menudo party When John Walton became governor of Oklahoma Oklahoma scrambled eggs and wild onions Texas chuck wagon Oklahoma prairie oysters / John M. Okison Oklahoma kush Oklahoma City's famous Suzi-Q potatoes / Lillie Duncan An informal bibliography. Vermont cookbooks Cook books by Texans Partial cook books edited and/or published in Oregon Delaware recipes bibliography Colorado cook books Arkansas books Mississippi cook books Georgia cookbooks Bibliography offering further sources for menus, receipts, and eating habits of Southern California Suggested reading From Publishers Weekly A genuine culinary and historical keepsake: in the late 1930s the WPA farmed out a writing project with the ambition of other New Deal programs: an encyclopedia of American food and food traditions from coast-to-coast similar to the federal travel guides. After Pearl Harbor, the war effort halted the project for good; the book was never published, and the files were archived in the Library of Congress. Food historian Kurlansky (_Cod_; The Big Oyster ) brought the unassembled materials to light and created this version of the guide that never was. In his abridged yet remarkable version, he presents what some of the thousands of writers (among them Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston and Nelson Algren) found: America, its food, its people and its culture, at the precise moment when modernism and progress were kicking into gear. Adhering to the administrators' original organization, the book divides regionally; within each section are entries as specific as A California Grunion Fry, and as general and historical as the one on Sioux and Chippewa Food. Though we've become a fast-food nation, this extraordinary collection—at once history, anthropology, cookbook, almanac and family album—provides a vivid and revitalizing sense of the rural and regional characteristics and distinctions that we've lost and can find again here. (May 14) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Just what we need in hard times, recipes for booya, mullet salad, Georgia possum and taters, kush, and Montana fried beaver tail. Kurlansky, the author of best-selling books about salt, cod, and oysters, discovered these gems in a two-foot-high stack of the “raw, unedited manuscripts” for an inspired but never completed WPA endeavor titled America Eats. As he explains in his invigorating introduction, the Federal Writers’ Project sent starving writers of all stripes (Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and other who qualified just because they could type) across the country to gather information about “American cookery and the part it has played in national life.” The results are vivid and playful dispatches from pre-interstate, pre-fast-food America, when food was local and cuisine regional. Kurlansky selected zesty writings, factual and imaginative, describing barbecues, fries, and feasts; profiling families; and defining New York City luncheonette slang (“blind ’em” means two eggs fried on both sides). Fun, illuminating, and provocative, this historic reclamation appears while we’re in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the one Franklin D. Roosevelt fought with his job-creating stimulus package and while we’re grappling with a plague of unsafe food and environmental woes associated with industrial agriculture. But don’t despair. Whip up Ethel’s Depression Cake, and throw a bailout party. --Donna Seaman

A remarkable portrait of American food before World War II, presented by the New York Times-bestselling author of Cod and Salt.

Award-winning New York Times-bestselling author Mark Kurlansky takes us back to the food and eating habits of a younger America: Before the national highway system brought the country closer together; before chain restaurants imposed uniformity and low quality; and before the Frigidaire meant frozen food in mass quantities, the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it.

In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, FDR created the Federal Writers' Project under the New Deal as a make-work program for artists and authors. A number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called "America Eats," was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed.

The Food of a Younger Land unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life. Mark Kurlansky's brilliant book captures these remarkable stories, and combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future. Kurlansky serves as a guide to this hearty and poignant look at the country's roots.

From New York automats to Georgia Coca-Cola parties, from Arkansas possum-eating clubs to Puget Sound salmon feasts, from Choctaw funerals to South Carolina barbecues, the WPA writers found Americans in their regional niches and eating an enormous diversity of meals. From Mississippi chittlins to Indiana persimmon puddings, Maine lobsters, and Montana beavertails, they recorded the curiosities, commonalities, and communities of American food.

A remarkable portrait of American food before World War II, presented by the New York Times -bestselling author of Cod and Salt . Award-winning New York Times -bestselling author Mark Kurlansky takes us back to the food and eating habits of a younger Before the national highway system brought the country closer together; before chain restaurants imposed uniformity and low quality; and before the Frigidaire meant frozen food in mass quantities, the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it. In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, FDR created the Federal Writers' Project under the New Deal as a make-work program for artists and authors. A number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called "America Eats," was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed. The Food of a Younger Land unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life. Mark Kurlansky's brilliant book captures these remarkable stories, and combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future. Kurlansky serves as a guide to this hearty and poignant look at the country's roots. From New York automats to Georgia Coca-Cola parties, from Arkansas possum-eating clubs to Puget Sound salmon feasts, from Choctaw funerals to South Carolina barbecues, the WPA writers found Americans in their regional niches and eating an enormous diversity of meals. From Mississippi chittlins to Indiana persimmon puddings, Maine lobsters, and Montana beavertails, they recorded the curiosities, commonalities, and communities of American food. This book is a portrait of American food -- before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional -- from the lost WPA files. An anthology with introduction and annotations of the unpublished manuscripts from the last WPA writers project, an exploration of food and eating in America in 1940. This broad assortment of raw, unpublished, 1940 manuscripts, including works by Nelson Algren, Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston reveal a very different America with a different cuisine and a different society. Illustrated with linocuts by the author. - Publisher.